Conventionally, telephones are made to include a single housing with a plurality of base options for mounting the single housing to a desk or to a wall. The housing conventionally houses the electronics for implementing telephone functionality interfacing to a subscriber line and for providing signals to a handset or speakerphone and for providing signals to a keypad and display.
Housing circuit boards and other components for telephone functionality within a common housing often requires shaping the circuit board or custom mounting the components in such a manner as to occupy available space within the housing. This necessitates custom designing of printed circuit boards and custom mounting of components for each different telephone shape or appearance. This adds additional cost and complexity to redesigning telephones to have unique shapes and appearances to establish product differentiation. Consequently, the cost to produce differentiated products is relatively high. What would be desirable, therefore, would be separating shape and appearance features of a telephone cover from functional features in a mass-produced telephone. The present invention addresses this need.